There were nights when the ships looked like ghosts on the water. When the fog rolled in and the lights from the tankers and the old, obscure fishing boats lit up the mist like a jack-o-lantern's face. It flickered and danced along the metal railings and errant ripples like a living thing that could burn you alive if it touched you.
The city beyond, never dark even in the depths of the night, hid its decay well. The underworld was swept into the shadows, the lost children pillaging dumpsters and taking up arms in a desperate bid to survive lost among the shining towers and brilliant mansions. They were no concern to the wealthy, to the elite. And compared to them everyone was elite. They crept along the alleys and beneath the docks like the rats they fought with for scraps. They stowed away on boats or in airships when the weather got cold, or when desperation left them no alternatives.
Sometimes they'd disappear without a trace, swept off to places unknown. Maybe death took them, or a new life. They all hoped for that. A new life. A way out. Other times a body would be found, and even though the authorities spoke a word to them the news spread like wild fire anyway. Death from exposure, from malnutrition, from violence. They had seen it all despite their youth—seen more in their short span of years than most adults could fathom.
Darkness was their cover, danger a constant menace at their heels.
Except for one on those nights when the ships floated like dim beacons on the waves.
She was tiny, a girl of eight years, give or take. Her dark hair waved and fell over her thin shoulders as she darted between shadows to the end of an old pier where none now moored.
This was her place, her dock, where she came on nights like this. She left the others to their bickering, and fear, and death. She left them all just long enough to imagine this life had faded away.
"Tie up those lines!"
"Get that motor running or I'll boot your ass outta here so fast you'll never know what hit you!"
"Cast off the stern!"
She loved to hear the sailors yell at each other. She couldn't see them, only hear them but she imagined what they looked like, what stories they might tell. She wondered what far off lands they'd been to and what things they had seen. If they'd had dolphins ride their bow or seen a sky so full of stars they stared in wonder at the sight.
In reality these men had never visited far off lands or taken a moment from securing the rigging or weighing anchor to take in the view but she didn't need to know that. She thought her Grandma Bela would have loved to watch the ships. She had often spoken of other worlds full of pirates and magicians. She had woven stories of knights and fairytales. You'll see places like those someday, she had whispered before she passed. Your destiny has always been written in the stars.
"One day," she'd whisper to herself. "I will see those things. One day this life will fade away."
She'd give up hope long before that day would come. She would dismiss it as a child's delusion. But in the end Grandma Bela would be proven right; it would come.
And when it did it would bring with it things she had never imagined.
